Pipette guns, such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,090,255, 4,624,147, 3,963,061, 3,834,240, each of which is incorporated herein by reference, are well known in the prior art. Prior art pipette guns comprise an elongate handle having a generally-rectangular cross section and a pair of pipetting triggers on one surface. A technician supports the pipette gun by grasping the handle proximate the pipetting triggers.
The dimensions of the handle of prior art pipette guns are selected based on the average hand size of a technician using the pipette gun. The handle size of prior art pipette guns is often designed based on the observation that a majority of technicians are women having small hands. As a result, repetitive use of the pipette gun by a technician with large hands can cause discomfort. Conversely, if the pipette gun handle is made larger, repetitive use by a technician with small hands can cause discomfort. Since a single pipette gun is used by many technicians, any fixed handle size is likely to cause discomfort to some group of technicians. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a pipette gun having means for adjusting the handle size to maximize comfort for any technician using the pipette gun.
A single pipette gun may be used to handle a wide variety of fluids including radioactive fluids, infectious fluids, and pure fluids. Therefore, it is important to clearly designate the pipette gun according to its current use so that contamination does not occur. In the prior art, technicians sometimes write on the pipette gun handle or apply an adhesive label to the pipette gun handle to designate its ownership, function, status, or the like. This method of identifying the pipette gun is inefficient and sloppy. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method of identifying a pipette gun according to ownership, function, status, or the like using a neat and replaceable indicator.